Don't think, but look

“Don't think, but look!” is one of the shortest sentences in the Philosophical Investigations and one of the most useful. Wittgenstein wrote it in the middle of a discussion about games. Board games, card games, ball games, the Olympic games: what do they all have in common? We are tempted to say there must be something, or we would not call them all games. Wittgenstein's answer: do not decide in advance. Look.

Wie gesagt: denk nicht, sondern schau!

As I said: don't think, but look!

Philosophical Investigations §66

When you actually look, he says, you do not find one feature shared by all games. You find a network of overlapping similarities, like the resemblances between members of a family: build, features, eye colour, gait, temperament, criss-crossing (PI §67). He called this family resemblance. But the method matters as much as the result. “Think” here means: reason from a ready-made picture of how things must be. “Look” means: attend to the cases in front of you.

Why we think instead of looking

Wittgenstein had a diagnosis. We get stuck because we nourish our thinking with only one kind of example (PI §593). A picture holds us captive (PI §115). The demand for a common essence is not the outcome of looking; it comes before the looking and blocks it.

He also noticed something that sounds like a paradox: what matters most is often hardest to see, because it is always there.

Die für uns wichtigsten Aspekte der Dinge sind durch ihre Einfachheit und Alltäglichkeit verborgen.

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden by their simplicity and everydayness.

Philosophical Investigations §129

That holds in philosophy, and it holds at the kitchen table.

Three exercises in looking

1. The ten-case list

Pick a word you use to judge: “lazy”, “successful”, “a good friend”, “talented”. Write down ten real cases you would describe that way, as concretely as possible. Then look at the list. Is there one thing they all share? Usually not. You will see clusters and overlaps, and some cases that only belong because they resemble another case. The word stays usable. It just turns out to be less of a verdict and more of a family.

2. Describe before you explain

When something goes wrong, write down what happened before you write down why. Who said what, in what order, at what time. No motives, no “because”. For philosophy Wittgenstein was radical: all explanation must go, and description alone must take its place (PI §109). In ordinary life we cannot abolish explanation, but we can postpone it. Explanations that come too early are usually the picture talking.

3. Watch the use

Wie ein Wort funktioniert, kann man nicht erraten. Man muß seine Anwendung ansehen und daraus lernen.

One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its application and learn from that.

Philosophical Investigations §340

For a week, notice how one word is actually used around you: “sorry”, “fine”, “busy”, “literally”. Write down three different uses. This is a good exercise for students of a foreign language, and for parents of teenagers.

Everyday examples

Parenting. “My child is difficult” is a thought. Looking means asking: when exactly? Mornings before school, but not at weekends? With one parent and not the other? The general label breaks up into particular situations, and particular situations are things you can do something about.

Work. Teams argue about “what our customers want”. Looking means reading ten actual support emails, or sitting in on three customer calls. Designers and researchers call this going into the field. Wittgenstein would have recognised it.

Studying. Students often memorise a definition (“a mammal is...”, “a sonnet is...”) and then stumble over the odd case. Collect examples first, including the strange ones (the platypus, the sonnet that breaks the rules), and the concept becomes something you can use rather than recite.

Online. A screenshot is a thought about a person. Their profile, history and context are the look. Before replying to a stranger, read three more of their posts. Often the reply changes, or turns out to be unnecessary.

Self-image. “I always fail at this” is a theory about yourself. Listing the actual cases (when did you try, what happened, what else was going on) usually gives a more mixed and more useful picture.

Limits and honest caveats

“Don't think, but look” is not an anti-intellectual slogan. Wittgenstein thought extremely hard. His target was one specific kind of thinking: the insistence that things must be a certain way, before and against what we see. Looking is demanding work in its own right. It takes patience and a willingness to be surprised.

Nor does looking replace science or expertise. A doctor who “just looks” without medical knowledge sees less, not more. And in grief, depression or anxiety, careful attention to your own situation is no substitute for help from people trained to give it. What Wittgenstein offers is a discipline of attention, closer to what a good teacher or a good editor does than to a technique for fixing your life. For background on this later method, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and of course the remarks themselves in the Philosophical Investigations.